Category Archives: confessional

Bon-Bons and Soap Operas and Other Stories

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Stop asking me what I do all day.

I’ve been wanting to say that since 1996 when my sister arrived at my apartment during one of the fifteen-minute intervals when my ravenous newborn baby was asleep and found me standing in my living-room flipping through a board book about farm animals.  My reply to “what do you do all day” used to sound noble – the kind of thing that gets championed on Facebook by mothers in need of recognition and respect and, heck, some social justice.  When I was raising my little boys I would have been justified in replying with something like, “I spend all day making human beings from my own guts and mettle, you ignorant boors.”

Oedie, the blue lineolated parakeet. She’s nuts.

1996 was a long time ago.  It’s been ages since that original farm animal board book fell into the toilet and passed out of our lives.  But questions about what I do with my daylight hours remain.  In fact, I’m getting questioned about them more than ever.  My youngest son started full-day school last month.  From 8:25am to 3:40pm, no one has any business being in my house except me and my deranged parakeet.  When my last son left the building, so did my best “excuse” for being at home full-time.

Sometimes I admit my life is now all soap operas and bon-bons, all day long.

But when I’m not feeling sarcastic, I’ll go on and on about how when I’m not doing all the cleaning, errands, shopping, and emergency interventions my family of seven still needs during the day whether any of them are inside the house or not, I’m at home working on my writing career.

These days, enough people work from home that we should all understand it’s not a sham for lazy folks.  Working from home may not be slick and pretty but it’s real.  And it’s an especially common practice for people working as writers.  Still, claiming I’m working as a writer just triggers more questions.

“Working?  But you already wrote your book, didn’t you?  What’s left to do?  What do you actually do all day?”

As far as occupations go, writing is pretty flaky.  I get that.  There’s no tool belt, no lunch kit.  And sometimes working as a writer means looking out the window, driving around crying, or using all the hot water zoning out in the shower.  Yeah, it’s pretty flaky some days.  But in between all those black-box creative cognitive processes there is real work to do.  We write at our big projects but we also write smaller pieces, read and review other people’s books, scour listings for new places to send our work, and manage systems for tracking what’s been submitted to where and how long we should wait before we give up on getting a reply.

For new writers, publicity is vital to success.  It doesn’t come naturally for most of us and it takes a lot of time and energy.  In addition to doing spoken and written interviews (if we’re lucky), we maintain social media presences on three or four different platforms and most of us write blogs.  Sure, some people do this stuff for fun.  I happen to thinking mowing lawns is fun.  But that doesn’t mean people who get paid to mow lawns aren’t really working.

In many ways, writers bring the perception that our jobs are jokes upon ourselves by talking about our work in terms of a lot of goofy, mystical claptrap.  It might help us feel gifted and precious in our own minds but if we’re going to indulge in silly, fanciful claims that make our skills sound like dubious super-powers, other people aren’t going to relate to our work the same way they relate to their own jobs.  People don’t really believe in super-powers – and frankly, neither do writers.  So let’s stop it.

If we catch ourselves beginning sentences with “Only a writer would…” or “You know you’re a writer if…” we ought to know we’re being pretentious and throwing away our professional credibility.  We’re begging people to ask us what we do all day.  I know it may be fun to think we’re doing the opposite – getting people to take writing seriously by astounding them with the “specialness” of it.  But it doesn’t work.  Stop it.  Let’s get off the “Memes for Writers” Pinterest boards and Tumblr blogs and grind our way through some word processor software instead.  That’s what writers do all day.

Kleines Mӓdchen: Little Girls on a Book Tour

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Reading on the Road

Reading on the Road

I never meant to cram a month’s worth of book promotion into seven days.  It just happened — an unforeseen consequence of good luck, good will, and good publicists.  I was so busy last week my kids actually noticed and mentioned how little time I’d been spending in my pumpkin shell.

I told them, “Look, I took a seventeen year mat-leave.  You’ve got nothing to complain about.”

Sure, it was a maternity leave full of freelance work and “will-you-just-let-me-finish-this” but I was here, in the house with them, for almost all of it.

The week started early Monday (because, that’s when it always starts) when I went into my closet — the room in the house most like a radio booth — and did a telephone interview with a talk-radio station in Edmonton.  It was a “top-line” interview meant to promote an appearance I’d be making in the city the next day.  It went well until the very last question.

“So,” Mr. Radio asked, “who’s taking care of the kids while you’re [in Edmonton]?”

Instead of musing, “You know, when my husband gets interviewed by the media, on the courthouse steps, no one ever asks him who’s looking after his kids,” I laughed it off.

“That’s their problem,” I told the interviewer.  “The oldest is seventeen so it’s Lord of the Flies over here when I’m gone.”

So far, no visit from Child and Family Services.

By bedtime that evening, I was gone.  I was at my sister’s house in Edmonton, getting ready for another “top-line” interview on the most terrifying of all media: television.  I haven’t watched television for years and I was scheduled to appear on a morning news show I’d never seen before.  What I remembered from TV was mostly how it’s been used to make “real” people look foolish and grasping.

In the morning, I got dressed while it was still dark — high black boots, skinny black pants, white top, black jacket.  Looking in my sister’s mirror, I finally saw it: I had subconsciously dressed myself to look like the black and white magpies on the cover of my book.

After a breakfast of Diet Coke with the coolest girl in Yellowbird Elementary School, I was on the freeway.  I got to the studio early enough to meet the other author being interviewed that morning.  In the green room was a man my age wearing a raspberry-coloured suit with a peach handkerchief tucked into the breast-pocket.  This was self-proclaimed over-dresser and Edmonton literary institution, Todd Babiak.  I thought I might run into him here.

“Don’t get nervous and start making fun of him,” one of my little sisters had warned me.  “That’s what I’d do.”

This was good advice.  It turns out Babiak isn’t a TV watcher either and we sat in the green room puzzling at the monitor on the wall as the program wound its way toward our segments.  He nodded at the anchor-lady on the screen.  “She’s actually read my book,” he said because, in a top-line interview, this is remarkable.

Left alone in the green room, I watched Babiak’s interview.  Of course, his raspberry suit had to be acknowledged on-air, just like my five kids at home had to be acknowledged on the radio on Monday morning.  The boys — they’re my raspberry suit.

Walking the hallway to the studio, I asked the producer with the pixie-cut hairdo, “There aren’t going to be any questions about who’s taking care of my kids, are there?”

She smirked.  “Any what?”

I told her about the radio station and we all scoffed together.  The anchorman who interviewed me was sweet in a clean-cut-captain-of-the-football-team kind of way.

I spent the rest of the day in the city, visiting family, calming the frick down before I went to a reading in a bookstore downtown.  The guests at this reading included some old friends I hadn’t seen in this century.  One of them reintroduced herself in case I’d forgotten her — which I certainly had not.  A wonderful thing about a book tour is the way it’s also a time machine.

After two days of massaging social media, the time came for another reading.  This one was closer to home, in the city my husband commutes to for work.  The Red Deer venue was warm and cozy and the time machine coughed out a long lost aunt and cousin.  There was a question from a woman — a fellow artist — who earnestly and innocently wanted to know how I “do it” with so many kids in my life.

I shrugged, “By being a crap mother, I guess.”  This might be my new pat-answer.  Put it right in the press kit.

fmroad

Get your kicks on Route 63

The last event of the week was the most ambitious one of all.  The person stepping out of the time machine this time would be me.  The  machine took the form of my black pickup truck — the kind they issue everyone crossing into Alberta’s borders.  I picked up my sister (the third sister in this story) and we went north, to Fort McMurray.

I’m no carpet-bagger, no oilsand opportunist.  For five years during the early 2000s, the city was my hometown.  I bought my first house, repaid my student loan, met bears, planted trees, and had two magnificent babies in the city.  An entire chapter of my novel is set in the Wood Buffalo region.  To get there, we drove for five hours — me boring the heck out of my sister with all my “Wow, this is so different.”  I alternated between, “I can’t believe all this is here” and “I can’t believe all that is gone.”  No matter what the Old Man says, the region is not Hiroshima.  It’s not a wasteland.  But it’s not like it used to be either.

In seven years, the city’s service industry hasn’t changed.  We arrived at 2:45 pm but we couldn’t get into our hotel room to change our clothes.  It was still a mess.  I’d be appearing in public looking like I’d spent the day in a pickup truck.  We hadn’t had a meal all day and we went to a fast food restaurant with milk and grease smeared all over the sky-blue tabletops.  This was familiar too.  The restaurant couldn’t hire enough staff to have anyone to clear the tables.  Customers go there knowing they’ll have to do it themselves.

At the event — a launch party for the latest edition of NorthWord: A Literary Journal of Canada’s North — I was invited to read first.  I chose the chapter set in the neighbourhood where I now stood reading.  And when I got to the part about the trees along the highway — the ones that now exist only in my imagination — I choked into the microphone.  Maybe it’d sound noble and Neil Young would pat me on the head if I tried to say I was having a fit of environmental conscience.  It wasn’t that.  It wasn’t the trees.  It was me.  There was some kind of awful longing rising in my throat with the words I read.  The whole time machine idea — it’s wrong.  This place that I love had moved on without me.  I was abandoned.  And I hadn’t even known it.

Part of the NorthWord event was in impromptu poetry contest.  The theme was contrast.  I jotted some lines and signed my sister’s name to them.  The poem was about the dirty tabletop at the restaurant.  It was silly and pretentious right down to the lines I wrote in German.  The judges got the joke and it won a prize in the contest.  But my sister was too embarrassed to let them announce it.  Fair enough.

Sister-Sleepover

Sister-Sleepover

When we were finally let into the hotel, we put on pajamas, got into one of the beds, put our heads together, and watched YouTube on my sister’s tablet — a sisters’ sleepover, just like old times, only not at all like old times.  Neither of us had wi-fi or a credit card or an ex-husband or a book to tour when we were little girls.

Still, those German words — the refrain from our winning poem — they were these:

Kleines Mӓdchen.

The Head Sneer-Leader Takes to the Field

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We knew by the way he sacked the basemen as he ran around the tee-ball diamond that football was the sport for our fourth son.  That was when he was five years old.  Now, at age eight, he weighs 100lbs, is tall enough to look his mother in the eye, and is finally old enough to play for our town’s Atom Chargers football team.

athletes onlyOne month into the season, he looks great on the field – shoving and sauntering.  But it hasn’t always been that way.  The first two practices were disasters.  He ignored the coaches, walked while everyone ran, and eventually wound up standing with his helmet pressed against the goal post in a self-imposed timeout.

With half an hour left in the second practice, I stood up from the stands and headed onto the field.  “You’re not going to want to make a habit out of that,” my friend, a seasoned football dad warned me.  He’s right.  But watching my kid bouncing his own head off the goal post over and over again was more painful than storming onto the field as “that parent.”

I got to the goal post, took my boy by the arm, and said, “You have exactly one more chance to do what the coaches say or you are grounded from the computer and all the video games.”

“Okay, Mom.”

So began his football career.  He’s still the slowest guy on the team but he’s playing a position where his job is to get in the way and knock people over.  He’s a natural.  Wherever he is at this very moment, he’s probably getting in the way and knocking things over right now.  He will never touch the ball during a game.  For a kid like mine, playing on the line, football is more a martial art than a ball-game.  And I am shocked at how much I – a former high school football sneer-leader – am enjoying watching my son playing sports.

Yes, it’s taken me four sons to finally have one involved in team sports.  Before him, I didn’t have any first-hand knowledge of how kids behave in organized sports.  Along with that ignorance, I didn’t have any experience with how parents behave while watching kids play sports.  I’d heard horror stories about parents cursing at coaches, threatening referees, yelling at kids, running out onto the ice or the field, embarrassing and upsetting everyone.  It seemed like craziness.  I didn’t disbelieve those stories.   But I didn’t understand the complexities of them either.

Not every parent meddling in his or her kid’s game is out there abusing coaches and trying to bully kids into far-fetched pro-sports careers.  Some of them are just trying to get their kids to do flaming anything.  When my son zoned out in the end zone, I could have got all tender, sighed something about how he wasn’t interested in football after all, unlaced his brand new cleats, and taken him home to our soft couches and lovely, glowing screens.

Big Mic in his practice gear

Big Mic in his practice gear

The fact is if my kids had it their way, they wouldn’t do anything that wasn’t easy for them.  They’d be charming writers, artists, and readers but they wouldn’t know how to swim or ride bicycles or speak French or do any number of other things that make them happy now that they’ve mastered them.  Young kids – like my linesman — don’t know anything about work or rewards or regrets or how everything in life but real love comes with an expiration date looming over it.  When my kid acted like he wanted to quit football, he wasn’t thinking about the day disillusioned adult-him might come brimming with blame, asking why I didn’t push him hard enough to make a difference when he was still a kid.  He’s not thinking of old-lady-me trying to justify to my daughter-in-law all the times I failed to kick his butt, leaving her to do it.  (I, on the other hand, am constantly thinking about my daughters-in-law.  I want those harpies happy.)

Someone owes it to kids to give them chances to learn new things – hard things.  For some parents, giving a kid a chance means writing a check, dropping him off at the sports field, and watching the magic happen.  For slow-to-warm-up kids like mine, giving them a chance often means riding them until they figure out what’s important for themselves.  And for other parents, like the guy I saw calmly carrying his screaming son off the field after the kid ripped off his cleats and threw them at his dad’s head, it means knowing when certain horizons are already as broad as they’re going to get and moving on to different ones.

So to all those parents of the eager, easygoing kids, don’t take those kids’ good attitudes for granted.  Thank them for it.  And take it easy on all of us “that parents” out on the field mixing it up with our more difficult kids.  We’ll try to go easier on ourselves too.  If it helps, let’s think of our different parenting-styles as CFL versus NFL football.  To people who don’t know much about it, the games look the same — but they’re not.

Oh, and go Chargers!

Marriage Tips of the Angels of Death?

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My Mr. and Me

My Mr. and Me

I wrote a novel about marriage.  It’s a novel, not a manual.  It’s meant to start conversations about love and relationships, not necessarily to resolve them.  Recently, I had one such conversation.  It was a discussion about whether the marriage I wrote is truly a happy one.  Would my main characters actually love each other if they had to live in the real world?

My position, of course, is that they would.  Most of my reviewers agree — but not all of them.

I’m not a marriage counselor.  When I’m writing, my job is not to lecture but to describe what I see in life and in my imagination.  That’s where the marriage I wrote came from – not from relationship theories but from inspiration found in things I’ve seen, heard, felt, and (as one reviewer pointed out) smelled.  And, since this is the Internet, I’ll write some of what I see in happy marriages in a list.  Maybe everyone’s list would be different.  But this list is mine – and ya won’t find anything on it about toothpaste caps or crapping with the bathroom door open.

Quick Disclaimer: I’m speaking of marriages where both partners are fairly healthy emotionally and socially.  I don’t mean situations of abuse or flagrant craziness where self-preservation demands a different list entirely.

What a Good Marriage Looks Like To Me:

1)      It’s Not Dating.  And thank goodness.  During his dating days, I had a miserable conversation with one of my brothers.  He didn’t want to live alone but at the same time he was worried marriage meant being trapped in a never-ending date – having to keep up a stream of witty conversation, fussing over the etiquette of opening car doors or not, orchestrating lavish events – all those company manners stretching on and on until someone in the couple mercifully dies and the other can relax.  Married people can go on dates but we are not dating.  Even if we aren’t holding hands at the movies every night, romantic moments can arise out of daily life – moments much more natural and genuinely loving than stunts copied out of hackneyed, soap-opera-inspired cultural scripts.

2)      It Maintains Physical Contact.  Look, it’s hard to stay mad at someone when she’s sitting in your lap.  The power of physical affection shouldn’t be underestimated.  Between people who love each other, it can take the edge off just about anything.  It can change fighting into flirting.  And it’s easy to use.  Slather it on.

3)      It’s Generous With the Benefit of the Doubt.  Everyone makes mistakes.  In a good marriage, mistakes are handled by thinking, “There is no way he meant that to sound so awful.  We must be missing something.”  When attributing motives to a spouse, it’s best to use a deductive approach – one that begins with the premise that the loved-one truly loves us.  From there, we assume the most basic motive is love.  We may be clumsy and unsuccessful in showing love but we try to see it underlying behaviours anyway.  We use humor and affection and warm, open communication to let partners know when there’s a glitch. We also use tenderness.  Frankness is not always a virtue.  Sometimes, it’s just laziness, malice, and thoughtlessness dressed up in a goofy costume made of 1970s self-help mystique.  Ironically, frankness can sometimes foster more misunderstanding especially when an issue calls for slow, delicate defusing to keep it from detonating and devastating the relationship.

4)      It Doesn’t Keep Score.  A good marriage has no tally sheet.  It doesn’t worry about “love banks” or throw down rules about how love must be proven or earned.  Marriage isn’t a corporation.  Instead of keeping balance sheets weighing good deeds against bad behaviours it just forgives and forgives and forgives.  It’s like a soccer game for 5-year-olds.  Try your best, have fun, concentrate on teamwork, forget the score, and it’s okay if everyone wins.

5)      It’s Not Preoccupied With Boundaries.  Individuality is the human condition, okay?  We’re all different and separate from one another.  Nothing anyone tries to do to us can change that.  For a romantic sap like me, the greatest challenge of our lives – including our married lives – isn’t to find ourselves but to find someone else and make them as much a part of ourselves as possible.  Marriage is one of those transcendent paradoxes about losing ourselves in order to find ourselves.

6)      It’s Open to Miracles.  This item on the list is important enough for me to break the Internet convention of limiting lists to five points.  Like I’ve said before, I don’t really know what makes marriage work.  It just does.  I have a good one.  Without much effort, I’ve been happily married to the same man for eighteen years.  But it’s not because we’re any better or smarter than anyone else.  There’s got to be a lot of luck – or something like it – involved.  A good marriage is not unlike a miracle.  And a miracle, by definition, demands faith that something unlikely can actually happen.  So believe in marriage.  Hope in marriage.  On many levels, marriage in the twenty-first century doesn’t make much sense.  But here we are.

So, Um, What Are You Doing Next Thursday?

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Yes, this is me, asking you out.

Invitation to my book launch party

Next Thursday, I’m having a party to launch my novel.  Whoever you are — whether you know me in person or not, whether I can see your house from mine or not — consider yourself invited (unless you are a child who is old enough to walk but not old enough to keep your mitts out of the punch bowl and sit and listen to Auntie Jenny read stories about dead people).

If you can’t make it to the Lacombe launch party, I’ll be reading in Red Deer at Sunworks on Friday, September 27 at 7pm.  And if you’re a big city type, I’ll be reading in Calgary at Pages Kensington as part of Filling Station’s Flywheel Series on Thursday, Sept 12 at 7:30.

Look, I’m delicate and socially awkward.  Come see me.

It’s Not You, It’s Me – The Post-Fiction Movement and My Novel

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A gravestone of a real great-great aunt at the real Butcher Hill Cemetery

A gravestone of a real great-great aunt at the real Butcher Hill Cemetery

There were cupcakes, pink tissue paper flowers bigger than my head, cupcakes, a sunny backyard full of people I love, and cupcakes. It was a family party – a birthday bash for one of my nieces.

Eventually, the conversation turned to the book I wrote that had been published exactly one week earlier.  My sister-in-law, who hadn’t read a word of the novel yet, was not quite kidding when she asked me, “So, which character am I?”

I could answer with confidence.  “None of them.  None of the characters in the book is anyone here.”  I glanced around the yard to make sure it was true.  It was.  None of the real people at this particular gathering cast any shadow on my fiction (except, I recall on rereading this, a few of my little sons).

“Doesn’t matter.  When I’m reading it I’ll think one of them’s me anyway,” my sister-in-law warned, because she’s funny and she’s self-aware enough to know how hard it is not to see ourselves in everything.

The conversation jostled my latent social science senses awake.  What would I find if I did a good old “content analysis” of my novel, chapter by chapter, looking for traces of real life?

Here’s what I found.  The chapters of my book roughly fell into three categories of reality/unreality:

  1. Chapters almost completely ripped from real life:   7 out of 23

This proportion is smaller than I feared.  These are the chapters where a few identifying features are changed, the sequence of events is streamlined, but most of the action and reaction unfold almost exactly like events from my personal and family histories.

2.  Chapters I Made Up Almost Completely — Almost:  6 out of 23

Hey, there’s real fiction in here!  What a relief!  I was gratified when my mum’s BFF wanted to know who in our real lives a certain character from the book was and I could answer with a resounding, “He’s no one!  I made him up!”

3.  Chapters Made from Conglomerations of Fictional and Real Elements: 10 out of 23

Not surprisingly, this mixed category is the largest one.  What’s odd about these chapters is that it’s the reality in them that strains the hardest against plausibility.  If a reader ever looks up from the book and says, “Nah, I can’t buy that” he’s probably rejecting something I lifted from real life and then toned down with fiction to make it less jarring.  An old lady who sleeps on a saw bench?  No way.  A cemetery called Butcher Hill?  That’s too much.  An exhumation? Get right out, that never really happens.  It does.  It did.  As they say, I can’t make this stuff up.  Maybe I don’t have the guts.

Since before I was born, it’s been a Beatles cliché that it’s hard for artists to come up with anything new.  The world is old and full of people and stories.  Part of the art-imitates-life problem is genuinely accidental, especially for people from large families like mine. The more people a writer knows with the intimacy of family, the more difficult it is for her to avoid treading on real life situations in her work.

For instance, I have an unpublished novel currently circulating with my agent about a group of five sisters.  Not coincidentally, I am one of five sisters.  When it came to writing sisterhood, a group of five was the size that made the most sense to me.  I make no apologies for that.  However, I started to squirm when I saw that, in order to advance the plot, I needed one of the sisters to have a professional medical background.  Fine.  But in my real sister-group, one of us works as a nursing instructor.  Medicine is full of women and this alone could be dismissed as chance.  But then the story needed one of the sisters to have a husband who’s adopted.  One of my brothers-in-law fits this description.  Another sister in the novel needed access to the justice system.  That’s me.  And the plot was going nowhere without a sister with lots of money – enter another fact from one of my sisters’ lives.  I finished the novel, looked at all the parallels, and wondered what really happened.  Did the plot arise first and demand all these real life details or did real life tumble around in my imagination until it formed into the plot?  And was the same kind of thing happening in my published novel?

There’s a literary movement hatching out of this chicken-and-egg fiction conundrum.  It questions whether recounting real life is actually a problem.  It’s been called “post-fiction” and refers to writing that obscures boundaries between fiction and fact.  As critic Michael H. Miller of New York Observer explains,

This writing represents a chiasmus between the real and the made-up, blurring the two into nonrecognition, confronting the reader with all those issues one is trained by the Western academy not to look for: namely, the author herself, hiding behind the words.

Recently, there’s been a spell of writers – like Sheila Heti and Tao Lin – producing novels with real people from their lives cast as characters.  Those real people include themselves.  Sometimes, not even the names are changed.  These narratives have been called tedious by some critics.  They state the obvious, deal in the mundane, they can be repetitive.  Some readers dislike them.  Some think they’re brilliant.

Whatever they are, they make me feel a little more confident in my own post-fiction inclinations.  I’m so comfortable with it I’ve made this digital “scrapbook” where I collect images, quotations, and music that inspired or emulate my book.  In true post-fiction style, I borrowed the idea from fellow writer, Rebecca Campbell.  You can see it here:

http://lovelettersoftheangelsofdeath.tumblr.com/

Readers might be getting used to seeing the author standing in front of the lens, in the foreground.  Maybe I’m cheating them if they don’t see me.  And I’m hard not to recognize.  Like me, the main female character in my novel is a mother of a group of sons, raising them under the influence of her solid marriage and her rather jaunty death fixation.  She goes where I’ve gone and seen much of what I’ve seen.  We have matching root canals in one of our teeth.  We both said the same thing to our husbands when we saw they’d cut their throats shaving the morning before we married them.  But even after all this, she is not really me.  The very act of creating her made her different from me.  She’s a story I tell.

And in the same way, regardless of any likenesses, I promise, none of the characters in my book is you.

So, What’s It About, Anyways?

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What’s this book about and where does it fit?

Ever since I got my book deal last autumn, I’ve been fumbling with the inevitable, perfectly natural question of, “So what’s your book about?”  Maybe I’m over-thinking it but I find this question difficult.

The first thing that makes my book hard to explain is the fact that it doesn’t fall neatly into a genre — and I’m not just saying that to try to sound cool and transcendent and stuff.  If the book was about sorceresses with magic necklaces and metal undies I could say it was fantasy.  If it was peopled with smoochy vampires it would be paranormal romance.  If it was about stabby psychopaths I could call it a crime novel.  If it prattled on about dating and shopping it would be chick-lit.  But it’s none of those things.  It’s kind of lovey-dovey, a bit creepy in parts.  It’s a little otherworldly yet it’s realistic and earthy.

When I was still submitting the manuscript, still ticking boxes in search engines of databases listing publishers’ interests, the box that fit best was called “literary fiction.”  And it’s the classification now stamped on the back cover of the book.  However, it’s also a term that gets sneered at for its elitist implications.  Who’s to say what’s of literary merit, and on and on and on… Still, if for no other reason than its acknowledgement that a flashy, racing story-line can come second to arty, thematic prose, literary fiction is the category that suits the novel best (she said, cringing, hoping not to sound elitist).

Another category fits simply because of my geography.  It’s “Can-Lit” — Canadian literature.  I am Canadian so, in some ways, I can’t help but write Canadian literature.  I’ve fallen back on this description a few times.  But Can-Lit has gained a character of its own over the years and when I offer it as an answer, I need to be prepared to embrace that character.  I need to be able to wave my hand and believe myself when I say, “It’s CanLit — you know, bad weather and complicated relationships.”

Nothing I say is very precise or descriptive or satisfying for nice people asking about my book.  So here’s a short Q&A with me about my novel.  It appears in my publisher’s online literary mag, Salon .ll., and hopefully it will shed some light on what I’m writing and why someone might want to read it.  Go ahead and click the link below.

http://www.lindaleith.com/posts/view/280

“Bring it On” — A Sexist Challenge on Childbirth

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“I had a lady friend years ago… who was a mother of several children. She had a bout of shingles. She told me she would rather give birth. I have had shingles. Bring it on.”  — A male friend of a friend on Facebook.com, July 26, 2013

mumjoe

My mother and her first grandchild

Facebook is a hurt-feelings-machine.  It’s an Offense-O-Matic.  It’s a Jerk-A-Tron.  It can make ordinary strangers sound like idiotic, sexist monsters.  We all know this.  However, Facebook is also the only place I can reliably see pictures of my nieces and nephews so, like most users, I have reasons to put up with the website that outweigh the heaps of garbage I find there.  But the comment quoted above – one made in response to a comedy sketch about a bogus medical device that transfers the pain of childbirth contractions from mothers to fathers — reads as particularly loathsome to me, even by Facebook standards.

When it comes to empathy for the ordeal of childbirth, I prefer quotations like this one:

“I’m sorry.  I didn’t know it could be like this or I would have told you.”

That’s what my mother said to me moments after my first son was born.  She didn’t say it because she was ignorant of childbirth and hadn’t worked hard enough to prepare me for it.  She had borne seven children herself and been frank with me about her experiences.  She knows much more about childbirth than most people will ever know.

But my mum was still shocked at how differently childbirth unfolded for me.  Unlike Facebook-Shingles-Man, there’s no bravado, nothing dismissive or smug in her response to my very personal passage to motherhood.  Standing at my hospital bedside, Mum knew my labour had been twice as long as any she’d ever had.  She had watched me struggle with the second stage – the pushing part where things usually developed quickly and fruitfully for her.  For me, it went on for hours, until the whole debacle finally ended in a traumatic, complicated delivery of a baby whose size was so out of proportion with mine that the doctor had said, “I can’t believe he was in there.”  My mum knew if we hadn’t been in a modern hospital that night, it would have been the night that I died.

Shingles.

My son’s birth was not what my mother had expected – and that was something I hadn’t expected.

Birthing a child is different for everyone, even closely related people like mothers and daughters.  And every time I had a new baby, his delivery was different from the other ones I’d weathered.  I don’t know why.  Maybe it had something to do with my age, the babies’ sizes, the tides, the placement of the pins in some Voo Doo doll – I don’t know.

Apart from physical differences, childbirth medical interventions also vary based on where we are, who attends us, and our personal choices.  My boys were delivered by four different doctors plus a boomtown nurse left alone with me while a fifth doctor was on lunch.  Even though I asked, none of my deliveries worked out so I could have much pharmaceutical pain relief.  Every time my children were born, I was right there for all of it – mind, body, and soul.  That’s certainly not the case for every mother.

Our bodies are different.  Our surroundings are different.  Our babies are different.  In addition to concrete factors like these there are innumerable emotional, social, cultural and other issues colouring our childbirths – enough factors to keep the experience infinitely variable.

I think the case of shingles is actually a good example of how social and psychological factors exacerbate suffering.  My mum taught me this too.  Only for her, it wasn’t shingles.  When I was an elementary school kid, she was hospitalized for kidney stones.  She said it hurt a lot, like having a baby, only there was nothing to hope for at the end of it.  There was no mounting sense of love to convince her that the pain was meaningful and worthwhile.  In light of that, I’m sure she, like Facebook-Shingles-Man’s “lady friend,” would have said she’d rather give birth than pass her stones.  Birth is hard but, unlike disease, it isn’t a bad thing.  Heck, I’ve been mired in arguments so painful I would have rather given birth than listened to another word of them.  But that doesn’t mean the experiences of birth and disease, or birth and a nasty argument, are equivalent.  What it does reveal is that the meaning of suffering affects our perceptions of it.

And there’s far more to withstand in childbirth than just pain.  There’s also fear and panic.  Birth is scary.  For some of us, the fear grows worse every time.  I was nervous when I was admitted to the hospital the morning of my first labour.  But by the time I arrived in an ambulance for my fifth labour, I was terrified – phobic and crazed.  No one in the comedy sketch that started me on this tirade had any comic device for transferring the fear of childbirth from the mother to the father.  Maybe even they know there’s nothing funny about that.

Yes, I get punchy when I hear people talking about birth as if it’s some kind of syndrome – a universal experience we all live through in exactly the same way.  I get especially punchy when that person is a man out to appropriate the most powerful and sublime of female powers for himself by equating it with a disease he’s suffered.  Clearly, what Facebook-Shingles-Man said was sexist – disgustingly so.

And then it’s more than sexist.  It would have been offensive even if it hadn’t been a man who’d said it.  What arises from the bad assumption that birth is the same for everyone is the worse assumption that we’re qualified to evaluate and pass judgment on each other’s reactions to childbirth – or anything else we suffer.  Looking at somebody’s suffering and joking about it or daring them to “bring it on” is never a decent thing to do.  It’s a perversion of empathy.  It’s a mistake my mum – someone wise and acquainted with the breadth of human experience called motherhood – taught me never to commit.

Schwester, Seour, Eonni, Jiejie, and Other Ways I Can Say “Sister”

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My German textbook.

I love the English language.  I was an early English talker, an average English reader, and have made writing in English my profession.  Sometimes, I imagine English loves me back.  Even if it doesn’t, I can usually coax it to stand up on its hind legs and help me say whatever I want.

No matter how much I love it, English is only one language.  I don’t know how many other languages there are in this world – maybe no one knows for certain.  It’s debatable and ill-defined.  At any rate, there are hundreds.  Maybe I’m greedy and faithless but it makes me sad to have full use of only one of them.

It’s not that I haven’t tried to learn more.

Just about every English-speaking Canadian reaches adulthood with some ability in French.  Our country has two official languages.  Like most of my comrades, I sat through daily French classes in public school.  On the east coast of Canada, most of my teachers were Francophones – Acadians with an accent different from the one in Quebec and definitely different from the Continental chit-chat on the cassette tapes that came with our textbooks.  When my parents moved us back to western Canada, I was taught French by an Anglophone who spoke like a computer simulation of a human being talking French.  Whatever their quirks, I’m glad for those lessons.  They were not a waste of time.  The proof is that I can hold my own in my sons’ elementary school French immersion classes – for now.

In university, I needed credit in a language other than English in order to qualify for my degree.  I was tired of speaking badly only in a Romance language so I enrolled in German.  The vocabulary was a blast.  German pronunciation was fun and I found myself reading it aloud even without comprehension simply because the sound of it made me so happy.  The grammar, however, was cruel.  I took my introductory course and was surprised to receive a letter from the German department offering me a spot in their honours programme.  It was sweet but the fact was (and is) that the German phrase I used most often was, “Wiederholen Sie das, bitte?”  It means, “Can you repeat that please?”  I used it to stall conversations while I slowly and painfully tried to decode the language.

I discovered Asian languages outside of school when my kids became fascinated with east Asian pop culture.  Currently, most of the television we watch comes from Japan, South Korea, or Taiwan.  I know about twenty words in Japanese, slightly fewer than that in Mandarin Chinese, and about 90 words in Korean.  But my Asian vocabularies are not very useful in normal, daily conversation.  The phrases I know tend to be the kind of thing someone might shout in dramatic dialogue – things like, “How can this be?” or, “There’s no time!” or, “Do you want to die?” or, for really special occasions, “Don’t go!  I’m sorry!  I love you!  Come back!”  Yes, my conversations with the nice Korean guys who own my favourite gas station have to be kept short or things might get a bit melodramatic.

Tallied up, that’s 4+ languages attempted and only one mastered.  It’s not an impressive record.  But I can’t quit now.  This summer, I’ve started seeking out a new second language.  It’s different again from anything I’ve ever studied.  For once, pronunciation isn’t a concern.  This language is not in my mouth.  It’s in my hands.  I need to learn American Sign Language.

A family member – the wife of one of my brothers – is losing her hearing.  It’s her story and I won’t try to tell it for her.  She’s a writer and can share it without any help from me.  My sister-in-law is a smart, pragmatic, optimistic person – a problem solver – and I’m sure she’ll figure out how to cope in a world where not enough people know how to talk directly to her.  She’s losing her hearing, not her speech so she’ll remain able to tell us whatever she wants.  No doubt, the person doing the heaviest lifting with my sister-in-law’s new communication strategies will always be her.  But maybe I can help in my tiny way.  And maybe language study will be different for me this time.  It will come with an urgency, a purpose, and a focus it’s never had before.  I’m not learning for grades or entertainment or curiosity or even in the interest of fostering Canadian national unity.  Instead, I’m learning in order to stay connected to someone I love.  It’s a language study aid I’ve never tried before.  It’s more compelling than any of the  impressive cultural, political, commercial, or neurological arguments that can be made for studying a new language.

Whatever it is, “Sister” is one of the first signs I’ve learned.

Commencing Countdown, Jewelry On

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The countdown to the release date of my novel, Love Letters of the Angels of Death, has passed the point where the time is measured in months and moved to where it’s measured in days.  Look, it’s right there in the column of widgets beside this post.  The moment has come to start opening the windows on my advent calendar.  The book’s release date is practically here.

Sometime I feel like dressing up like someone who wrote an artsy, Gothic love story because, well...

Sometime I feel like dressing up like someone who wrote an artsy, Gothic love story because, well…

In preparation, my literary fairy-god-sister, author Fran Kimmel, came along last week and held my hand as I booked a venue for the novel’s launch event.  It’ll be happening here, in the small-ish town where I live, on August 29.  The timing – a Thursday night right before the last long weekend of summer – is terrible.  I know that.  It won’t be convenient for anybody.  In my head, I’m already composing the passive-aggressive email I will send to all my first degree relatives living within a 100km radius of my house.  The message will explain that, while I will try my best to act like a grownup, if any of my nearest and dearest skip my launch party, I might be stuck thinking very, very hard about their absences for a very, very, very long time.

Yes, I’m fighting against an inclination to take the book’s release and launch far too seriously.  I keep coming back to that line from the sappy radio follow-your-dreams pop song that made me cry in the car on the way home from the venue last week: “I don’t want to waste this.”

In what was probably not a great moment in Feminism, I spent an hour in my closet trying to figure out what to wear to the launch.  My closet is usually a happy place.  It has everything from thrift shop finds to fancy satin bridesmaid dresses.  But nothing seemed quite right.

I thumbed through the hangers and thought about Trish – one of the many weekend editors I freelanced for at a car-crash of a boomtown newspaper during our years in the north.  She was tall and what someone writing a romance novel might call “willowy” – burgundy lipstick and dark, Morticia Addams hair.  She wasn’t satisfied with the mug-shot the last editor had been printing beside my columns and called me down to the office so she could take a better one.  When we met, she pulled her elegant spider-leg eyebrows together and tried to imagine my face in her new, fabulous arts-chick vision of the newspaper.  All she said was, “Oh, you’re such a mom.”

At the time, I hadn’t yet turned thirty and I had three children under the age six.  I hadn’t slept through the night in years.  I didn’t own any clothes that couldn’t be tossed into a washing machine.  The lipstick I’d put on in the rear view mirror minutes before had a distinct rouge-on-the-dead look to it.  I typified the shabby, faded waste of talent this lady (who did become a friend of mine) called “a mom.”

There are a host of arguments I could make for why she was wrong and why she was right and why looking like a mom can be glorious.  But in the closet, a month before my book release, none of that mattered very much.  I was mired in one of the shallower depths of my consciousness – one that dreads anyone seeing me at a podium with my novel and thinking, “Look at her.  Oh, she’s such a mom.”

In passing, I mentioned my wardrobe silliness to my publisher.  I think a part of me wanted her to send me a uniform – a matching Linda Leith Publishing t-shirt and cap, maybe even an apron and hairnet.  Instead of sending me a kit, Linda’s advice was simply to wear something that made me feel terrific.

Something terrific would be something I could forget about – something that could fade into the tone and rhythm of the reading and talking and celebrating I’d be doing during the launch.  And I was beginning to form a vague, shadowy notion of what that might be.  Ever since I signed the publishing contract last winter, I’ve been slowly dressing more and more like someone who’s written an artsy, Gothic love story because – dangit — that’s who I am.  I knew the spirit of what I wanted to wear but couldn’t yet read the letter of it.

My glamorous sister-in-law understood.  We’ve been together for over eighteen years.  That’s her entire adolescence and adult life.  She sees me from an angle similar to the one her brother, my husband, uses to look at me – one that somehow makes me appear genuine and beautiful and at the same time, one I hardly recognize when she describes it to me.  She took me to her favourite jewelry shop – the place where a nice old hippie guy once diagnosed me as psychic – and helped me choose a pendant I could use to anchor my launch-day wardrobe.

It’s set in silver and shaped like an eye – a blue eye like my eyes, my husband’s eyes, and the ten blue eyes I assembled from the atoms of my own body as the mother of our sons.  There — that’s me.